Category Archives: Lindsay and Schomaker

While the president’s plan to have direct talks with the North Koreans is fascinating, in a sort of unnerving way, right now we’re going to look at the Moon Township angle. There’s a special House election coming up on Tuesday, and it’s perfectly possible that when it comes to international détente versus the 18th Congressional District, the White House’s real fixation is western Pennsylvania.

The 18th C.D. is at the heart of the white, working-class vote that won Trump the Electoral College. It also has wildly gerrymandered borders aimed at guaranteeing Republican control unless the incumbent does something incredible, like championing anti-abortion legislation after hinting to his mistress that she ought to get an abortion if she’s pregnant.

Whoops. That was Representative Tim Murphy. Gone but not forgotten.

So there’s this special election, which features Democrat Conor Lamb, a handsome young former federal prosecutor, versus Rick Saccone, a Republican state representative who is hanging onto Donald Trump like — um, we will not say Stormy Daniels. That would be totally tacky, and this is a serious political moment. We’ll just say that Saccone says he wants to go to Washington and be the president’s “wingman.”

David Lindsay:
We gave a modest donation to Conor Lamb today—$20. Kathleen Schomaker and I decided to do this after reading about him in the NY Times during the last two weeks, and I probably posted some of those articles to blog 1, InconvenientNews.wordpress.com. Today, Gail Collins’ piece put us over the top. But then I hesitated.
Should we support this insurgency in the rust belt of Pennsylvania? Sun Tsu, in The Art of War, wrote that the best attack is a surprise attack. Should we hold our very limited powder and shot for the November 2018 election, so as not to warn the right wing billionaires that they have to do even more to secure their electoral gains?
I have read in the NYT recently that the Trumpistas are calling all hands to make sure their surrogate wins this special election, since Trump won this district by 20%. They do not want the resistance to see that they can draw blood. However, this is not a military battle in southern China, but a political awakening of the diverse progressive sub-groups in the United States, who don’t regularly bother to go to the polls and vote, and of white working class folk, who are realizing that Trump is an environmental, political and economic disaster for the nation and the world.
While there is a small danger that early progressive victories might invigorate Trump’s billionaire financial supporters, we decided that there is a bigger benefit to drawing blood, and creating some sense that Americans can work together to fight the propaganda and fake news of the Trumpistas and the right-wing oil and gas and media billionaires.